Problem uploading avatars/profile covers and more problems

Hello,

Today I bought Easysocial and installed it. Tried to configure it all day and evening, but I just cannot get it right.

I want to use it as an advanced user profile system. Dont want to use all functionallity of it. I use Easyblog, komento and discussions on the same site, but dont like the way they handle user profiles. So I thought. Lets try easysocial with it. I also have some sites running jomsocial, but in my believe, jomsocial is way to heavy for what I want with this site....I do want to disable photo albums for instance. It is a site specially for ship/train/plane-spotters (the core is to create a database around pictures, sorted on the way I want, with a small community arround it. There for I use FW gallery for the photos. Although not ideal, it does its job. (will there be FW gallery integration by the way sometime?)

However, installing easy social was easy....everything installed fine and it appeared to work fine....

There are however some problems I encountered, and the biggest so far is the avatar/profile cover upload. I cannot find any documentation about easysocial, so therefor I post it on the forum. Are there some directory permissions which have to be set? where are the profile covers uploaded? that kind of things...

avatar upload does not work...
there is a way for a user to make it work. He has to try to upload an avatar. It appears to go well, but the picture is not shown at all...
after the user has tried to upload the avatar, I (admin), have to manually give the /media/com_easysocial/avatars/users/<user_id>> 777 access rights via ftp. (or when the user_dir does not excist, create it myself)
Then the user can try again and the avatar will be there (although the user does see some errors appear, the avatar is there....

this is not the way it should be. So I must be doing something wrong, but I have no idea what....

The profile cover does not upload at all...did not even found a workaround....it just does not appear....the upload gif just keeps turning, but it nevers finishes.....not via profile edit, not via the profile itself.....

the question is: what do I have to setup, to make it work? I had the EasyDiscuss profile as the leading profile, before installing easysocial.

Next to this big problem I encounter, I also discoverd another small one...
I could not find a way to go back to english language, when having selected dutch. Dutch is far from complete, so I wanted to change back to english after selecting dutch. The only way to do this, was to to turn the complete frontend of the site to dutch OR delete (via ftp) the language file in the nl-nl dir.....

ok, deleting the file is a solution, but I dont think that is the preferred solution

final problem I discovered: the module that shows notifications does not take in account the settings of that module in the backend. I can turn on or of what I like in that module, but it just does not keep the changes in mind....it saves the settings, but on the frontend it is not taken in account...It always shows al options in the frontend. I only want home/friends/messages to be shown in that module...no search for example

I have tried several times to purge/delete all the cache of the site. This didn't matter...problems still there.....

Hopere someone can help with this. All I want is an advanced user profile (basic compared to the things easysocial offers), integrated with easyblog, easydiscuss, komento and fw gallery and I have a feeling that easysocial is perfect for this, but after the first day of trying to set it up, i have no idea how the fix those basic things....

thanks in advance,
Eelco

edit:
I use:
joomla 3.1.5
easyblog latest version
easydiscuss latest version
komento latest version
fw gallery latest version